Sumo

Craig McDean
Sumo

Photographs: Craig McDean

Publisher: Morel books

54 pages

Year: 2011

Comments: Hand-bound softcover, 24 x 16.5 cm, b&w photographs. Second edition copy for Paris numbered 36/150.

From the artist: "In 1993 I lived in Japan for a year.

Through a friend I had the uncommon access to the world of the Sumo wrestler. I began to visit the Dohyo every morning around five, the start of the Sumo practice. I entered their world and eventually befriended many of the wrestlers.....

In the beginning, I was just visiting and taking photographs from a distance.....

Now, almost twenty years later, I began looking at the photographs again and seeing this body of work in a completely different way. The fluidity and abstraction of these enormous and graceful bodies in motion has inspired me all over again. They remind me of the near religious experience of being in the presence of the graceful Sumo."